“What I want to impress upon you, and the greatest heritage a parent can pass on to any child, is this: It’s _your_ world, yours to enjoy, yours to live in, play in, work in, get the most from. Every healthy activity exists to be experienced and not to be watched while others experience. Every social accomplishment, every art, every science, every hobby, has come about and is enjoyed because normal, healthy people in the past have found pleasure, enjoyment and improvement in them. If they have done so—you may likewise. Life has been given to you to get your portion. But Life can’t seize you by the shoulders and drag you in. You must go in for yourself. The deepest wrong I can conceive a grown person doing to a younger is implanting within his or her subconscious mind that horrible ‘You mustn’t!’ It’s the blackest handicap a child can acquire. My creed is ‘Do!’ Never doubt yourself. Never believe you’re any different from any girl or woman who has ever lived on earth. Because you’re not. Yet you’re not commonplace, either! The greatest self-crime is self-depreciation. Remember that all people believe in you unless you doubt yourself. They take you not at somebody else’s appraisal but solely at the estimate you place upon yourself. Timid people are only those with half-developed souls. I don’t mean by not being timid that you should be noisy or obstreperous. A child’s home influences should curb or counteract hoydenism. But hold up your head, be positive, never fear to look at life courageously, to see it clearly and see it whole. The world is yours, my dear, and all the men and women in it—for your enjoyment and boon companions.” “You make me afraid when you talk to me like that—and yet you make me glad!” the girl responded wonderingly. “I’ve learned it by bitter experience, dear—my philosophy. I’ve told you something of my story: how I started life a poor girl in a village up in Vermont. My father and mother were never able to see beyond the village sky line. Life and the outside world terrified them. Forever they were telling me ‘You can’t!’ Doubting themselves, of course they doubted their daughter. From ‘You can’t!’ it was a step to ‘You mustn’t!’ I loved a man at eighteen as dearly as I ever loved anybody. He was a smart young man, with many excellent qualities. In those days he was considered so smart I doubted that I could be his wife. It sounds strange. But I did. I thought he needed a cleverer woman than myself to be that wife successfully. I told him so. It broke his heart. Then my father and mother died suddenly—within a year of each other. I had to make my way alone; earn my living. I went to Boston. Always I found myself a wallflower, a spectator, while others played and enjoyed. I wanted to play and enjoy also. But I’d been taught to believe that ‘nice girls’ didn’t do anything but sit and fold their hands. Then, praise God, a man came and took me up into an exceeding high mountain.” “Captain Theddon?”